Legal
What we store, why we store it, who else sees it, and how to get it back.
In short
Your account. Email address, a password hash (never the password), a display name, optionally a country, and the times you created the account and last signed in.
Your Lichess link. Your Lichess user id and username, any title, your ratings for bullet, blitz, rapid and classical, whether each is provisional, your number of rated games, the date your Lichess account was created, and the two standing facts Lichess publishes: whether the account carries a terms-of-service mark and whether it is closed. All of this is read from Lichess, never typed by you.
Your entries. Which tournaments you registered for, when, what you paid, the eligibility decision and its reasons, and your results and any prize.
Payments. Stripe’s identifiers for the session and the charge, the amount, the currency and the status. Not your card number, not your name on the card, not your billing address. Payment happens on a page hosted by Stripe; those details never reach our servers.
Fair-play checks. Every automatic account check, what it found, and the account facts it was decided on. See the fair-play policy.
Sessions and security records. Session tokens, rate-limit counters, and an audit log of actions that move money, access or roles — which may include the IP address the action came from.
Usage time. For signed-in accounts, the server stores daily seconds observed between short, consecutive heartbeats from visible Hub and ChessOS tabs. It counts each account once across tabs and devices. This does not measure attention, and it excludes guest and public-page time.
Connecting Lichess uses OAuth. We ask for no permissions at all — zero scopes. The authorisation proves you control the account and lets us read your public profile once.
As soon as we have read your identity, the access token is revoked at Lichess and discarded. For the overwhelming majority of players, Chess4prize therefore holds no Lichess credential whatsoever: we cannot play as you, message as you, or see anything about your account that is not already public.
An administrator creating tournaments may grant scopes, because creating an arena requires them. Where a token is kept, it is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, and it is deleted when the account is unlinked.
Afterwards we keep your ratings current by reading your public Lichess profile — the same page anybody on the internet can see.
We do not sell your data, we do not share it for advertising, and we run no advertising or third-party analytics trackers on this site. The first-party usage measurement described above stays in our own database.
These parties are necessarily involved:
Publicly visible: your Lichess username appears in tournament standings, on the leaderboard, and beside any prize you win. Your email address is never shown publicly.
Write to info@chess4prize.com from the address on your account and ask for:
You can unlink your Lichess account yourself at any time, from your account settings. Unlinking deletes the stored Lichess data and revokes any token we hold.
What deletion cannot remove: records of money taken and prizes paid have to be kept for accounting, and a result that has already been published in standings is part of a tournament that other people played in. In those cases we remove what identifies you personally and keep what the record requires.
If you are in the EU or UK you have these rights by law and can complain to your national data protection authority. The supervisory authority for Chess4prize depends on where the operating entity is established, which is an open item below.
Sessions, one-time email tokens, password-reset tokens and rate-limit counters expire on their own and are deleted automatically by a background process.
Account data is kept while your account exists. Records of payments, entries and prizes are kept beyond account deletion for as long as accounting rules require.
Daily usage-time totals are kept while your account exists and are deleted when it is closed. Brief live-presence rows expire automatically.
Private messages and Server posts are deleted 90 days after they were written; a message you delete loses its text at once. A message our automatic check held back is kept for our reviewers for 90 days as well, then deleted. Voice-room seats and connection messages expire within minutes and are removed by a routine cleanup. Closing your account deletes your conversations, your posts, your date of birth and your Server memberships; a Server you own passes to its longest-standing admin, or member, or is deleted if nobody else is in it.
A specific retention period for fair-play checks and audit records after an account is closed has not been fixed yet. We would rather leave that blank than write a number nobody has agreed to keep to — see the open items.
Passwords are hashed, never stored or recoverable. Any Lichess token we keep is encrypted at rest. All traffic is over HTTPS. Payment card details never touch our servers.
Sign-in and password-reset attempts are rate-limited, and actions that move money, access or roles are written to an append-only audit log.
No system is perfectly secure. If you find a vulnerability, please write to info@chess4prize.com before disclosing it publicly.
Chess4prize takes entry fees and pays prize money, so it is not for children. A minimum age is stated in the terms. Social (friends, messages, Servers and voice) is for players 16 and older.
These are facts about the operating business rather than about how the platform works, and inventing them would be worse than leaving them out. They are required before Chess4prize charges a live entry fee.
This document is written by the people who built and operate Chess4prize. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer, and it is not legal advice. It describes how the platform actually behaves; where something is undecided it says so rather than guessing.
Social: friends, messages, Servers and voice
Date of birth. Asked once when you first open Social, which is for players 16 and older. It is used only to check that age. Nobody else sees it, and it is in your data download.
Friends and presence. Your friends, requests and the accounts you block. Whether you are online, and what you are doing (“at a board”), is shown only to your friends, and you can turn it off in Settings. Being a member of the same Server never shows it.
Private messages. The text, when it was sent or edited, and how far each of you has read. Only the two people in a conversation can read it. Messages are not end-to-end encrypted: they are stored on our servers so that they can be delivered. Our team reads a message only when someone has reported it, and then only that message.
Servers. A Server’s name, crest and description; its members and their roles; its channels and posts; and a record of what its owner and admins did (invites, removals, bans) so disputes can be checked. Only members can see a Server — and our reviewers, when a member reports it.
Voice. Your microphone is used only after you press Join, and only while you are in a call. The sound goes directly from browser to browser and never through our own servers; we do not record it. If we switch on our relay for networks that block direct connections, a call that needs it passes, encrypted, through that relay’s provider (Cloudflare), which cannot listen to it. We store who is in a voice room and whether they are muted, and pass on the short technical messages that connect two browsers; those expire after a minute and are then removed by a routine cleanup. When browsers connect directly, the people in a call can see each other’s IP address. Do not join calls with people you do not trust.
Reports. Who reported, the reason, any note, and who the report is about. Our reviewers see the reported message or Server and record what they decided. The person reported is not told who reported them.
Automatic chat safety. Every private message and Server post is checked before it is delivered. Our own rules, running on our servers, look for slurs, threats and spam. The text of the message alone — without your name, your account or the rest of the conversation — is also sent to OpenAI’s moderation service, which tells us whether it looks like harassment, hate, a threat, sexual content or self-harm. A message that breaks the rules is not delivered: you are told why, and our reviewers see that message (and only that one), where it was written and what happened automatically — a warning or a short chat pause. Nobody is ever suspended or banned automatically; that is decided by a member of our team, and a reviewer can withdraw any automatic warning.